Your family stories

[unpopular]

Thought it'd be fun to make a thread to tell family stories. They don't need to be 100% likely or true, just how they were told to you as a child, I ask that people not question or doubt the validity of these often exaggerated tall tails. Chances are we know full well that they're stretched a bit. I'll start:

My great uncle was always a pretty tough guy. He worked as a Maine Guide all the way up to his death. He was older than my grandfather, who died in his late seventies. I think he was out there in the woods, all the way up into his early 80's.

The story is that when he was in high school, he threw the principle out of a second story window. They shipped him off to military school, where he dropped out at seventeen to join the Canadian military. When he got to the recruiter, they asked him how old he was and where he lived - he answered truthfully. The recruiter told him "not anymore" and that he was eighteen, lived in some small town in Quebec and sent him on his way to basic training. Guess he was just more eager to fight the Nazis than Roosevelt was.

 

[spang1mw]

Great idea!

Well here is mine that I was told as a kid growing up. My grandpa when he was little had a job as a paper boy in a decent sized neighborhood. After a while he got tired of delivering all of the papers. So he decided it would be a good idea to just dig a big hole and start dumping all of them into it every week and not deliver any papers. I don't know if he was fired or quit but it's funny nevertheless.

 

[shefjr]

My dad used to walk to school and home like five miles in the snow bare foot everyday. Oh! It was also up hill both ways.:lmao:
I gotta wonder how many others have heard this same story?

 

[MSnowy]

The story goes back in the 1930s my grandfather and another fireman were involved in role-over accident while responding to a fire. It was a mid-winter night in MA..The temps below zero, snow covered grounds and no such thing as winter clothing as we know it. They took both bodies to the funeral home where hours later my grandfather came to and found himself in a pine box. This story was told by my grandfather. Years later going through some old family papers I found the newspaper article about the accident and what had happened to my grandfather.

 

[Tuffythepug]

My dad, long since passed away, use to tell that when he was a little boy in Oklahoma a car pulled up next to him on the street to ask directions. He climbed up on the running board of the old Ford, looked inside and saw Pretty Boy Floyd in the backseat full of Thompson machine guns and pistols. He swore it was a true story

 

[unpopular]

Rumor has it that while my uncle was off doing what he loves best, fighting, my grandfather's service with the Marines was a little more tragic. He was a Marine Corps intelligence officer, we were told by my uncle that he was at Auschwitz (or some other death camp), a superior would point at objects, including piles of dead bodies, and he'd take a photograph. After he was done there, they handed him his discharge papers and sent him home.

 

[bentcountershaft]

I ask that people not question or doubt the validity of these often exaggerated tall tails.

Finally, I can share the truth about my grandfather being a Warlock.


Actually, this is a neat idea. I'll share something later, I'm supposed to be studying for finals.

 

[The_Traveler]

I ask that people not question or doubt the validity of these often exaggerated tall tails.

You may not want people to question your tall tales but you should at least try to fit your exaggeration into the historical facts.

 

[unpopular]

^^ that's not really the point of this thread. i'm not so much interested in what really happened, but rather the stories we grew up with.

 

[bentcountershaft]

Ok, a quick one before I take a break to watch the Walking Dead. As far as I know this is true and since it only a single generation back and actually involves me personally, I have no reason to doubt it.

My parents were young when they had their first child. Dad was 21 and mom was 16 (gasp, different time and all that) and my brother was born six and a half months after they married. So basically, yeah, shotgun wedding. Anyway, things surprisingly worked out for them and after ten years my mom was ready for another baby. My dad, however, wasn't. I guess the way he saw it he had eight more years to freedom. Mom was insistent however and finally told him she was going to quit taking birth control pills. Dad, undaunted, proceeded to purchase condoms (better late than never I suppose) much to my mother's dismay. Now my mother was pretty stubborn and wasn't going to give up on something she truly wanted, so she took action. Nine months later I arrived.

What did she do? She implemented a simple solution involving poking needles through all the condom packages. She often joked to my dad that I was always a naturally strong swimmer. How my dad never resented me I'll never know.

 

[The_Traveler]

^^ that's not really the point of this thread. i'm not so much interested in what really happened, but rather the stories we grew up with.

Maybe because most of my family disappeared in a Polish concentration camp, I'm a little more sensitive about using them as the basis for odd family stories.
The Auschwitz concentration camp organization of 3 main camps and a bunch of satellites was in Poland and about 3 million people were killed there.
It was liberated by the Russian Army and remained in the Soviet sphere and almost off limits until long after the war.
Except for the rare inspection from higher ranking Allied officers, I would guess very few US military ever reached there.
There were comparatively few US Marines who served in Europe and their roles were narrowly defined, serving mostly as invasion and shock troops.

Be glib about other subjects.

 

[unpopular]

as I said, I was unsure if it was Auschwitz, I myself had my doubts about that.

However, I was told that he had some involvement in documenting holocaust activities after the war, at least according to my uncle who had told this to my father. My grandfather never spoke to any of us what he did exactly. We also know that he suffered night terrors. As an intelligence officer, it's unlikely he saw actual combat. On the other hand, he may have not revealed what he saw due to the secret nature of it, though if this were the case, I don't think he'd tell his brother either.

At any rate, I did not mean to offend you at all. But i do know for a fact that he was involved with military intelligence in Europe durring and immediately after WWII, and that there are stories with a fair amount of detail leading up to his discharge. Like I said, I am only retelling what was told to me.

 

[SCraig]

My parents were both pilots in the late 1930's. My mom was only 15 lied about her age so she could get her pilot's license. She and one of her friends flew at airshows around the area, my mom as the pilot of a Stearman and her friend as a wing-walker. Somewhere along the line she and my dad met at an airport somewhere and started flying together. Eventually they fell in love and got married. My dad was a photographer for the Tennessee Highway Patrol at the time, so I guess that's where I got my love of airplanes and photography.

Years later, after I got my pilot's license, I took my mom and sister flying. I let my mom fly the airplane and we flew over some of the areas that she thought she remembered from years before. I doubt it, the area had changed dramatically in 40-odd years, but it didn't really matter. It was worth it just to see the happiness in her eyes.

 

[runnah]

My mom once forgot to set the parking brake on her Toyota and it rolled down a small embankment and into some shrubbery. My younger sister was in her car seat and my other sister did her best Bruce Willis impression and jumped out of the car. Everyone and everything was fine but the funniest part was that my mom called my dad at work hysterical saying that the car went off a cliff with my sisters in it. My dad nearly had a heart attack on that one.

 

[sm4him]

Oh my--there will be no need for me to exaggerate any stories, I come from a very long line of highly entertaining, extraordinarily dysfunctional folks.

We'll start with a mild one and work up from there. My great-grandmother's boyfriend was C.W. Post (the founder of Post cereal). He proposed to her, but she chose instead to marry the man who became my great-grandfather, believing him to have the most "promise." Post ended up marrying twice and then committing suicide in the early 1900s...but not before amassing quite a fortune and leaving a financial "empire" for his only daughter. My g-grandfather, on the other hand, was a farmer...a dirt poor farmer who worked hard but never really had much. My g-grandmother was a bitter woman her entire adult life, believing she'd made the wrong choice, and treated my g-grandfather like dirt. This little story factors into my next bit of family history.